


We Should Quit But We Love it Too Much

by auselysium



Category: Emmerdale
Genre: M/M, Smoking, Song fic?, reaction fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-26
Updated: 2015-06-26
Packaged: 2018-04-06 05:40:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 771
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4210044
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/auselysium/pseuds/auselysium
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Aaron never understood why people made such a big deal about quitting smoking. You just stop.</p><p>He wonders how this same logic has failed him so completely where Robert was concerned.</p><p>(Reaction fic to 6/26/15 episode.  After his confession to Cain.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	We Should Quit But We Love it Too Much

Aaron wants a bloody cigarette.

Just one. He wants to go through those familiar motions. Filtered end to lips, lighter to tip, strike of the spark then flame. Inhale. The acrid, bitter heat hitting the back of the throat before going down to the waiting lungs. Exhale and leave behind that first nicotine rush to the head.

He needs that. That easy dizziness. Numbing the pain from Cain’s fist that still lingers between his ribs. Letting the tingling in his fingertips be from something other than the feel of Robert’s blazer.

Aaron sits on top of a picnic table outside the pub, his back to the ongoing wedding reception slash get-out-of-jail-free party continuing inside. He hears his mom laugh. The bass of the party mix Diane has pumped through the sound system. He’s well chuffed for Adam and Vic. Truly he is.  But Aaron can feel none of the same joy everyone else is feeling tonight.  He feels only distant and numb.

He takes several large chugs of his pint and looks down at his hand, remembering what it looked like to see that slender cigarette paper, wound tight and white except for where it burned, resting between his first two fingers. The image that had portrayed - the roughness, the toughness - had been just as addicting as the drug inside them.

He’d been smart enough, somehow even then when he was such a crass, belligerent idiot, to never let it go further. He’d never snuck those drugs he dealt. Never felt the need to resort to that form of sedation even as the person who was his whole life chose to end his and Aaron was left unpunished for helping it happen. He’d found other ways to deal with it then.

So when the time came, the cigarettes had been easy enough to quit. One disapproving look from his athlete boyfriend as he snuck out onto their miniscule terrace for yet another midnight smoke became the last disapproving look from his athlete boyfriend. He threw out the pack then and there and never looked back.

He never understood why people made such a big deal about quitting. You just stop. Besides the cigs in France had tasted like shit.

But as he takes a deep breath now, his lungs filling with nothing more than the slightly grassy scent of an Emmerdale summer, he wonders how this same logic had failed him so completely where Robert was concerned.

That fucking pompous, beautiful, infuriating, addictive bastard. Just as dangerous and deadly as those cigarettes whose scum had once lined his lungs.

Their first kiss hadn’t been enough. Aaron would never have been happy with just the one off. So instead it had become like a gateway to more. More kissing, more touching, more skin on skin and eyes penetrating eyes. More feeling. More needing. Always more and never enough.

And now, even now, after all the times he’s said in not so many words, “You’re no good for me.” he still can’t kick the Robert habit. The games they played with each other, the times they fought and made up or the times that things were simply just _good_ are just as viscerally memorable as any nicotine induced high and his body aches for it.

_Robert in the boot, the sunlight catching his desperate blue eyes as they looked to Aaron for help. Hearing Cain’s punches, his ear pressed to the warehouse door, knowing that with each muffled thud, Cain drew blood and agonized grunts all at once. Robert’s “Do you expect me to believe that?”, his voice like dark velvet, a seductive incantation on repeat and again and again in his mind. That almost smile, peeking from underneath the blood as Aaron left. Admitting to Cain that it had been him, all along. It had been the two of them. His tears revealing just how much and how deep their secret had gone._

Aaron growls, snapping himself out of the memories. He notices the white rose still pinned to his lapel and rips it off, throwing it to the ground. His veins are alight with feelings that just won’t go away no matter how much he tries to deny it, to drag himself away from the source.

He’s seen the warning labels on the side of the cigarette cartons warning about cancer and brain damage. The words printed in bold black and white. He doesn’t need a similar set of warnings where Robert is concerned. He knows his poison is just as potent.

But Aaron doesn’t care. He would do just about anything for a fucking smoke right now.

Or for Robert.

**Author's Note:**

> Influenced by Hozier's Sedated
> 
> Sedated we're nursing on a poison that never stung  
> Our teeth and lungs are lined with the scum of it  
> Somewhere for this, death and guns  
> We are deaf, we are numb  
> Free and young and we can feel none of it.


End file.
